Top Gear: series 20, episode 3, BBC Two, review

Gerard O'Donovan reviews the third episode of the new series of Top Gear on
BBC Two.

Given that the UK’s biggest petrol-head event, the Goodwood Festival of Speed, had hardly fishtailed to a tyre-shredding finish an hour before broadcast, it is not unreasonable to assume that a significant percentage of Top Gear’s most ardent fans won’t have been watching this edition as it aired (stuck as they probably still were in the world’s prettiest car crawl home, if memory of past events serves).

Then again, that’s what Monday repeats are for (or iPlayer if you’re more push-button than crank starter). And it would be a shame to miss what was a classic edition (the best of this series so far by some miles) in which Clarkson, Hammond and May decided – with the generosity of spirit, sensitivity and good will to non-British nations for which this trio are so deservedly famed – to take pity on the poor economically benighted people of Spain by bringing to them three “budget” supercar convertibles - budget meaning, loosely, they each cost less than £200,000.

The cars in question were a McLaren 12C Spider (Clarkson), a Ferrari 458 Spider (Hammond) and an Audi R8 V10 Spyder (May). But that hardly matters. This was all about showing those of us who will never be able to afford one, how much fun it would be to own and drive a spectacular looking, sounding and performing vehicle, especially in a parallel universe of totally empty, traffic-free roads.

And this Spain was phenomenally empty – whole townfuls of new-build houses, shops and schools laid waste by the property collapse; a road through the Sierra Nevada, one of the highest and most beautiful in Europe, which simply stopped because the money for building it ran out; an international airport with tumbleweed rolling through it, having gone bankrupt a couple of years ago. Extraordinary.

Education was hardly the primary objective but it did give a sense, however skewed, of how hard the Spanish economy has been hit. That, and what a good use for a mothballed runway is maxing out a 195mph-plus car; or how ghost towns could always be repurposed as ready-made grand prix street circuits. Sensitive, indeed, especially calling it the Sir Francis Drake circuit.

But the fun wasn’t all confined to Spain. Yet again Top Gear proved that no subject is too low for its puerile humour – especially not the name of Icona design director Samuel Chuffart, which had our trio falling off their chairs. And if you were one of the keen geographers who spotted that the empty, snowy, suspiciously Scottish looking mountain landscape Mr Clarkson was zooming through last week was not actually Hertfordshire, as he claimed – you might have felt his apology (the show was “inundated with complaints”) was less than heartfelt.

Still, a cracking edition whose only minor disappointment was that Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch failed to solve the mystery of how to get a Vauxhall Astra round the Top Gear test track in a remotely impressive time. Not so much a Silver Blaze as A Study in Scarlet for the somewhat abashed actor.

And followed by Hunt vs Lauda, a gritty and gripping documentary that drove straight to the heart of Formula One’s biggest rivalry of the 1970s. All in all, a vintage night for motor-maniacs on BBC Two.